An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (31 page)

A few weeks later, visiting family and friends in England, I mentioned Stephen and his drawings to my brother, David, a general practitioner in northwest London. “Stephen Wiltshire!” he exclaimed, very startled. “He’s a patient of mine—I’ve known Stephen since he was three.”

David told me something of Stephen’s background. He was born in London in April of 1974, the second child of a West Indian transit worker and his wife. Unlike his older sister, Annette, born two years earlier, Stephen showed some delay in the motor landmarks of infant life—sitting, standing, hand control, walking—and a resistance to being held. In his second and third years, more problems appeared. He would not play with other children and tended to scream or hide in a corner if they approached. He would not make eye contact with his parents or anyone else. Sometimes he seemed deaf to people’s voices, though his hearing was normal (and thunder terrified him). Perhaps most disquieting, he did not use language; he was virtually mute.

Just before Stephen’s third birthday, his father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Stephen had been strongly attached to him and after his death grew much more disturbed. He started screaming, rocking, and flapping his hands and lost what little language he had. At this point the diagnosis of infantile autism had been made, and arrangements made for him to attend a special school for developmentally disabled children. Lorraine Cole, the headmistress at Queensmill, observed that Stephen was very remote when he started school at the age of four. He seemed unaware of other people and showed no interest in his surroundings. He would simply wander about aimlessly or occasionally run out of the room. As Cole writes:

He had virtually no understanding of or interest in the use of language. Other people held no apparent meaning for him except to fulfill some immediate, unspoken need; he used them as objects. He could not tolerate frustration, nor changes in routine or environment and he responded to any of these with desperate, angry roaring. He had no idea of play, no normal sense of danger and little motivation to undertake any activity except scribbling.

She later wrote to me, “Stephen would climb onto a play-bike, pedal it furiously, then hurl himself off it, roaring with laughter, and sometimes screaming.”

Yet at this point the first evidence of his visual preoccupation, and talent, appeared. He seemed fascinated by shadows, shapes, angles, and by the age of five he was fascinated by pictures, too. He would make “sudden dashes to other rooms, where he would stare intently at pictures which fascinated him”, Cole writes. “He would find paper and pencil and scribble, totally absorbed for long periods.”

Stephen’s “scribblings” were largely of cars and occasionally of animals and people. Lorraine Cole speaks of his doing “wickedly clever caricatures” of some of the teachers. But his special interest, his fixation, which developed when he was seven, was the drawing of buildings—buildings in London he had seen on school trips or that he had seen on television or in magazines. Why he developed this sudden, special interest and preoccupation so powerful and exclusive that he now had no impulse to draw anything else is not wholly clear. Such fixations are exceedingly common in autistic people. Jessy Park, an autistic artist, is obsessed with weather anomalies and constellations in the night sky;
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Shyoichiro Yamamura, an autistic artist in Japan, drew insects almost exclusively; and Jonny, an autistic boy described by the pioneer psychologist Mira Rothenberg, for a period drew only electric lamps, or buildings and people composed of electric lamps. Stephen, from this very early age, had been almost exclusively preoccupied with buildings—buildings, by preference, of great complexity and size—and also with aerial views and extremities of perspective. He had one other interest at the age of seven: he was fascinated by sudden calamities, and above all by earthquakes.

95. Meeting a young physicist-astronomer, Ben Oppenheimer, recently, I mentioned Jessy’s paintings, and showed him copies of some. He was astounded at their astronomical accuracy, and was reminded of an amateur astronomer and minister, Robert Evans, in Australia. Evans single-handedly, with a small telescope, observed the incidence of supernovae in a sample of 1017 bright (Shapley-Ames) galaxies which he observed for a period of five years (examining, Oppenheimer calculates, sixty or moie galaxies each night); he went on from this to deduce a new figure for the supernova rate in such galaxies. (This work was published by van den Bergh, McClure, and Evans in The Astrophysical Journal.) Evans used no photographic or electronic assistance, and thus seemed able to construct and hold in his mind an absolutely precise and stable image or map of more than a thousand galaxies, as seen in the southern sky. It seems likely that his memory is either eidetic or savantlike, though there is no suggestion that he is autistic.

Whenever Stephen drew these, or saw them on television or in magazines, he grew strangely excited and overwrought—nothing else disturbed him in quite this way. One wonders whether his earthquake obsession (like the apocalyptic fantasies of some psychotics) represented a sense of his own inner instability, which in drawing he could try to master.

When Chris Marris, a young teacher, came to Queensmill in 1982, he was astonished by Stephen’s drawings. Marris had been teaching disabled children for nine years, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for Stephen. “I was amazed by this little boy, who sat on his own in a corner of the room, drawing”, he told me. “Stephen used to draw and draw and draw and draw—the school called him ‘the drawer.’ And they were the most unchildlike drawings, like St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge and other London landmarks, in tremendous detail, when other children his age were just drawing stick figures. It was the sophistication of his drawings, their mastery of line and perspective, that amazed me—and these were all there when he was seven.”

Stephen was one of a group of six in Chris’s class. “He knew the names of all the others”, Chris told me, “but there was no sense of interaction or friendship with them. He was such an isolated little chap.” But his native gift was so great, Chris felt, that he did not need to be “taught”, in the ordinary way. He had apparently worked out by himself, or had an innate grasp of, drawing techniques and perspective. Along with this, he showed a prodigious visual memory, which seemed able to take in the most complex buildings, or cityscapes, in a few seconds, and to hold them in mind, in the minutest detail—indefinitely, it seemed, and without the least apparent effort. Nor did the details need to be coherent, to be integrated into a conventional structure; among the most startling early drawings, Chris felt, were ones of demolition sites and earthquake scenes, with girders lying everywhere, exploded in all directions, everything in complete, almost random disarray. Yet Stephen remembered these scenes and drew them with the same fidelity and ease with which he drew classical models. It seemed to make no difference whether he drew from life or from the images in his memory. He needed no aide-mémoire, no sketches or notes—a single sidelong glance, lasting only a few seconds, was enough.

Stephen also showed abilities in spheres besides the visual. He was very good at mime, even before he was able to speak. He had an excellent memory for songs and would reproduce these with great accuracy. He could copy any movement to perfection. Thus Stephen, at eight, showed an ability to grasp, retain, and reproduce the most complex visual, auditory, motor, and verbal patterns, apparently irrespective of their context, significance, or meaning.

It is characteristic of the savant memory (in whatever sphere—visual, musical, lexical) that it is prodigiously retentive of particulars. The large and small, the trivial and momentous, may be indifferently mixed, without any sense of salience, of foreground versus background. There is little disposition to generalize from these particulars or to integrate them with each other, causally or historically, or with the self. In such a memory there tends to be an immovable connection of scene and time, of content and context (a so-called concrete-situational or episodic memory)—hence the astounding powers of literal recall so common in autistic savants, along with difficulty extracting the salient features from these particular memories, in order to build a general sense and memory. Thus the savant twins, calendrical calculators whom I described in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, while able to itemize every event of their lives from about their fourth year on, had no sense of their lives, of historical change, as a whole. Such a memory structure is profoundly different from the normal and has both extraordinary strengths and extraordinary weaknesses. Jane Taylor McDonnell, author of News from the Border: A Mother’s Memoir of Her Autistic Son, says of her son: “Paul doesn’t generalize the particulars of his experience into the habitual, the ongoing, as many (most) other people do. Each moment seems to stand out distinctly, and almost unconnected with others, in his mind. So nothing seems to get lost, repressed, in the process.” So it was, I often thought, with Stephen, whose life experience seemed to consist of vivid, isolated moments, unconnected with each other or with him, and so devoid of any deeper continuity or development.

Though Stephen would draw incessantly, he did not seem to take any interest in the finished drawings, and Chris might find them in the wastebasket or just left on a desk. Stephen did not even seem to concentrate on his subject while he was drawing. “Once”, Chris related to me, “Stephen was sitting opposite the Albert Memorial: he was doing a fabulous picture of that, but at the same time looking all around—at buses, the Albert Hall, whatever.”

Though he did not think that Stephen needed to be “taught”, Chris devoted himself as much as possible to Stephen and his drawing, providing him with models, with encouragement. This was not always easy, because Stephen did not show much personal feeling. “In a way, he was responsive to us, the adults—he would say, ‘Hullo, Chris,’ or ‘Hullo, Jean.’ But it was difficult to reach him, to know what was in his mind.” He seemed not to understand different emotions and would laugh if one of the children had a temper tantrum or screamed. (Stephen himself rarely had tantrums at school, but when he was little, he would sometimes have them at home.)

Chris was central in Stephen’s life between 1982 and 1986. He would often take Stephen, along with his class, on outings in London, to see St. Paul’s, to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, to see Tower Bridge being raised and lowered. These outings finally incited Stephen to words in his ninth year. He would recognize all the buildings and places they passed, traveling in the school bus, and excitedly call out their names. (When he was six he had learned to ask for “paper” when he needed it—for many years, he had not understood how to ask for anything, even by gesture or pointing. This therefore was not only one of his first words, but the first time he understood how to use words to address others—the social use of language, something normally achieved by the second year of life.)

There were some fears that if Stephen began to acquire language he might lose his astounding visual gifts, as had happened, coincidentally or otherwise, with Nadia. But both Chris and Lorraine Cole felt that they had to do their utmost to enrich Stephen’s life, to bring him from his wordless isolation into a world of interaction and language. They concentrated on making language more interesting, more relevant, to Stephen, by linking it with the buildings and places he loved, and got him to draw a whole series of buildings based on letters of the alphabet (“A” for Albert Hall, “B” for Buckingham Palace, “C” for County Hall, and so on, right up to “Z” for London Zoo).

Chris wondered if others would find Stephen’s drawings as extraordinary as he did. Early in 1986, he entered two of them in the National Children’s Art Exhibition; both were exhibited, and one of them won a prize. Around this time, Chris also sought an expert opinion on Stephen’s abilities from Beate Hermelin and Neil O’Connor, psychologists who were well known for their work on autistic savants. They found Stephen one of the most gifted savants they had ever tested, immensely proficient in both visual recognition and drawing from memory. On the other hand, he did rather poorly in general intelligence tests, scoring a verbal IQ of only 52.

Word of Stephen’s extraordinary talents started to spread, and arrangements were made to film him as part of a BBC program on savants, titled “The Foolish Wise Ones.” Stephen took the filming very calmly, not at all fazed by cameras and crews—possibly even enjoying it slightly. He was asked to draw St. Paneras Station (“a very ‘Stephen’ building”, as Lorraine Cole emphasized, “elaborate, detailed and incredibly complicated”). The accuracy of his drawing is attested by a photograph taken at the same time. (There is, however, a curious error: Stephen makes a mirror reversal of the clock and the whole top of the building.) His accuracy was astounding, as were the speed with which he drew, the economy of line, the charm and style of his drawings—it was these that won viewers’ hearts. The BBC program was shown in February of 1987 and aroused a storm of interest—letters poured in, asking where Stephen’s drawings could be seen, and publishers offered contracts. Very soon a collection of his work, to be called simply Drawings, was slated for publication; and it was this I received the proofs of, in June of 1987.

A is for Albert Hall